


We Don’t Have These Memories (but one day we will)

by fluffernutter8



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Episode Related, F/M, Future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:00:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27254587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: Five dates Buffy and Angel nearly went on, and one that they did.
Relationships: Angel/Buffy Summers
Comments: 12
Kudos: 26
Collections: I Will Remember You





	We Don’t Have These Memories (but one day we will)

_i. I thought we had…_

_A date. So did I. But who am I kidding?_

**Angel and Buffy, Halloween**

Kissing Angel, Buffy decides, is quickly becoming one of her favorite things, and she wants to continue doing it as regularly as possible. Daily, possibly hourly if he’s up for it, which he pretty much seems to be. Maybe even minutely, assuming she can somehow find a way to skip enough school (and figure out how to stake vampires while her mouth is occupied with something other than punnery).

It's so easy just to lie back on her bed, Angel's voice warm in her ear between kisses, his arms wrapped safely around her, his careful, tingling fingers pressing into her back. It is so easy to feel relief at being herself again, at having her strength and knowing it, having Angel's eyes open especially for her and knowing that too. Next time she gets into the awkward zone, certain that he really wants someone prettier or cooler or more mature or smarter or any of those things that she sometimes wishes she could take a Flintstones vitamin for, she's going to try to remind herself of how he'd done everything to make sure she wouldn't be hurt tonight, how desperate he'd looked as Spike leaned over her and how glad when she started to fight back. How he'd smiled at her, that rare, real Angel smile, seeing her come into her room just now even in her oldest sweatpants and no makeup. She wishes she could have caught and held the feeling it gave her when he had called her exciting, interesting, as if the things she isn't don't matter, don't hold any meaning for him at all.

Still, even with all that, even with all that she's learned, how good it all is to know, she wishes just a bit that they'd gotten a chance to have coffee at the Bronze. It's stupid, yeah, because Angel's probably had a lot of coffee in his time, he might have been around for the invention of coffee, she doesn't know, and he's probably had ten million dates, more dates than she can even think of ever having. But...it would have been nice to sit there with him and talk about movies or school or his favorite time in history, to lean forward as if to catch each other’s words over the music even though they both had predator’s hearing, to wrap their hands around their mugs and grin at each other just a little as their eyes caught and lingered while they sipped. She would have liked to have people wonder who exactly was that gorgeous guy that weird Buffy Summers was sitting with and for someone to whisper back, "Oh, that's her boyfriend."

She’s falling for Angel in the quiet of her bedroom, in the graveyards of Sunnydale, in the late-night library as they try to find new answers to the latest supernatural disaster. But every so often, she wishes she could fall for him in other places. She knows it probably doesn’t matter to him. Maybe he’s actually more comfortable here in the tucked away corners where it’s just them and he doesn’t have to hide his secrets or put up with things that he’s seen so often they bore him. But sue her: sometimes she wants to do things the way other people do. Sometimes she wants to love him where everyone can see.

* * *

_ii. Do you get the feeling that we're kind of in a rut?_

_What about that fire demon nest in the cave by the beach? I felt that was a nice change of pace._

**Buffy and Angel, Choices**

Angel doesn’t usually take much interest in the newspaper. After a couple hundred years of headlines, all the political intrigue and tawdry personal scandal tend to blend together a bit. Still, with the upheaval in local politics lately, he thinks it’s wise to keep an eye on things. He doesn’t exactly have a packed schedule, and he’s happy to pick up anything he can to keep more responsibility from piling onto Buffy’s plate.

The Mayor doesn’t seem to have any surprises revealed in today’s issue of the _Sunnydale Herald_ , but when Angel turns to the final page, he comes across a large advertisement for the St. Petersburg State Ballet on Ice touring company’s upcoming West Coast performances. Scanning over the details, he sees they’ll be in Sunnydale doing Sleeping Beauty for two weeks in September. He doesn't know the company in particular, but considering the national standing in skating and ballet both, he imagines a positive reputation would be deserved, and the show is obviously a classic.

He remembers her submerged disappointment at missing the ice show with her father, even if it wasn’t exactly because of the lost opportunity to see the skaters at work. He thinks of her face, openly, adorably embarrassed talking about her "Dorothy Hammill phase," her shoulders, graceful and relaxed as she twirled around the rink. Was that the last time he saw her so unburdened? He knows that to some degree she can't allow herself to be unguarded, not when so much rests relentlessly on her. He knows that he has been the cause of that weight on her, more than he ever wanted to or should have been, more than he had once realized he could be. He also knows that he can do something, can do more to help.

"You never take me any place new," she had said earlier tonight, small and plaintive and honest. She isn't wrong. He and Darla had toured the world, spurred not only by practical necessity, the need to stay ahead of torches and pitchforks, but by the restlessness of immortality. The attempts to add excitement to eternity seem to him now so much more desperate, burdensome and foolish rather than the grand, whirling journey they had seemed at the time; the idea of a permanent home has instead become so much sweeter.

He's been around for long enough to know that just being with Buffy is enough for him, that it is better in so many ways than new places or adventures. But she has had so much less time to experience these things, even before her life developed the sort of constraining calling with which he never needed to contend. He can't give her the world, can't free her from those parts of her life which take away her choices, keep her restricted to this place, this mission. It strikes him, though, that he can give her this: a night of beauty, something to bring her joy, to remind her that even this little corner of the world can be worthy and that this life doesn’t have to be something to which she resigns herself. He wants to be able to assure her that his mind is full of her, that he wants her to be happy in all ways.

He calls the box office the next day to make a booking, messengers over cash that afternoon even though he knows that it’s the sort of wealthy recluse move which will raise eyebrows. (Somehow, probably fewer eyebrows than the fact that he’s pretty sure he never signed any paperwork for the mansion, just ate the lawyer who presented it to him and moved in.)

By the time the envelope with a pair of tickets is sent over to Crawford Street, everything stuffy with the August heat, no one is there to collect them. On the night of the performance, Buffy takes care of a vampire nest at an old gas station. Angel ignores or doesn’t notice the advances of a sweet young man in favor of taking out his clearly undead friend, his mind already on returning to the quiet of his apartment even though once he’s there he doesn’t feel any more satisfied or at home. As the crowd gasps and applauds the performance, there are two empty seats in the best area overlooking the rink. No one pays them any attention.

* * *

_iii. Sleep. We'll make another one like it tomorrow._

_This is the first time I ever really felt this way….Just like I've always wanted to. Like a normal girl, falling asleep in the arms of her normal boyfriend. It's perfect._

**Angel and Buffy, I Will Remember You**

Lying next to warm Angel is strange. Good strange, Buffy reminds herself, amazing strange, but still, definitely not what she’s used to.

Except obviously she isn’t used to any of this, and she’s fully looking forward to being an old hand at everything involved with having a regular, human Angel for a boyfriend. Bring on the wrinkly palms and creaky old knuckles, she’s ready for it.

 _We should get breakfast in the morning_ , she thinks to herself, turning in Angel’s arms. She wonders if he can feel the way her mouth is turning up in a half-asleep smile against his bicep. _We’ll go out._

She can see it clearly, as if it’s already happened, the two of them at a cozy corner table in some cute, sunlit cafe. Angel will take forever to decide between breakfast options (she’s almost certain that he significantly predates the invention of the waffle, so he has that to look forward to) and end up ordering something ridiculous, probably called the Hungry Man or the Big Dude, and she will make fun of him for it. But he will just give her that smile of his, the one that is broad and crinkle-eyed and so new to her, the one which has been getting such a workout today.

“You don’t know how _good_ it all is,” he will say, slightly wondering, while she rests her chin in her hand and smiles and smiles, overcome by his delight at everything still and again, after all this time.

Maybe she’ll let him convince her to go to a museum, so he can see the artwork in the daylight for the first time. He’ll point things out to her, brush strokes or the use of green or something, it won’t really matter when all she’ll want to do is point out to everyone around them how smart and excited and _alive_ he is.

They’ll go to the beach, probably, and she will make him buy a stupid looking hat - he’ll have forgotten about sunburns and considering it’s been two hundred-odd years since his last tan, his skin is past pale and into “no need for that ghost costume for Halloween” territory. She’ll tell him about all of the clothes she’s planning on buying him: Angel in T-shirts! Actual blue jeans! She might even dream of a bathing suit, although the idea of shorts and sandals is probably too much to ask. He’ll push back a little (“What’s wrong with what I have now?”) but he’ll be laughing too, and the sun will reveal blonde or red in his hair that she’s never seen before, and she will be so happy, so happy.

There will be more food and more time in bed and talking, probably, a lot of talking to figure out the Sunnydale/LA thing. Maybe he will decide to move back, or maybe they’ll commute to see each other. LA isn’t exactly long distance - it would be basically a slightly more than local relationship. And to think yesterday they weren’t even on each other’s Christmas card lists.

And the best part is that they will have another chance for it all the tomorrow after that, and the next one, a chance for lunches out and quick cups of coffee and sunrise hikes, or maybe actually midday hikes so neither of them has to get up that early since she doesn’t really want to and she also has the feeling that Angel’s body clock is going to be _weird_. The only thing she has to do now is to wake up into it.

So she closes her eyes and lets herself sleep, eager for it all and certain in its wonder.

* * *

_iv. Angel. He—He needs to see me._

**Buffy, Flooded**

There’s a place, nearly in the middle between Sunnydale and LA. The diner is even more rundown than when the Summers women stopped there four years previous with their trunk full of moving boxes, even shabbier than the way Buffy described it to Angel while walking through the graveyard one night (“It felt like a moment, you know? Like, the marker between goodbye accidental gym arson, and hello mysterious but completely aboveboard teenage fun”). The hash browns and buttermilk pancakes are still as good as they were then, but neither of them will ever find that out. They talk with polite care that makes the waitress forget the way Angel released her name from his chest as she walked through the door and the way Buffy seemed almost to fall into him as they embraced. Finally, he is sick of watching her prodding her food from one side of the plate to the other.

“Come on,” he says.

In the room at the adjoining motel, they sit resting against the headboard of the surprisingly neat if dusty bed. When they hold each other, it is uneven. There is not even a chance at a second’s pure happiness, not when Buffy’s eyes have a look of such dead calm finality, not when he knows that his touch, his presence, isn’t enough to help anything.

He is familiar with the ways that hell makes the most mundane comforts of earth feel like a trick, a trap, an indulgence that you want to take advantage of, to gobble into yourself in the seconds it’s there, even as you know it would be foolish to give in and show weakness. He doesn’t sense any of that in Buffy, her huddled-in despair, the shell-shocked barrier of mourning which seems to surround her.

“You can tell me anything,” he says during the darkness, remembering the last time they sat like this, all those difficult emotions shared so easily beside her mother’s grave. “You know that.”

It’s the only thing he can think of, and she responds immediately, even though her words are slow, more like she’s saying them in a trance than as if they’re carefully considered. “Everyone wants me to talk, since I came back. They want me to take care of things, and they want me to talk. But it’s all just words. It doesn’t help.”

He almost wishes her voice was pressing up against tears, filled with that brave openness he used to see from her. Instead it is flat, and he holds her to himself, trying to give her this at least. He knows better now than to offer what he had wanted to when he thought things would be different: more meetings like this, as often as she wants them, where they can share and listen with each other, find that particular support that they’ve often needed and haven’t had for nearly three years. But it isn’t what she is looking for, and it would be more about his own selfishness, his own need to see her than anything else.

It wouldn’t fix things, just as this hasn’t fixed them, and he isn’t sure she still has enough within her to hope that it would.

He had fallen in love with her joy and her encompassing heart, her bright sincerity of self. He will still love her even with those things muffled or broken, will still love her even though he cannot tell now if she loves herself, even as he does not know when he will next see her, or if he will recognize her when he does.

* * *

_v. Buffy loves you, but she's gotta live her life. People change_

**Andrew, The Girl in Question**

The club is crowded, overwhelming with sweat and music and tourists, shouted Italian she still doesn’t understand enough to do more than “Uh-huh” at it with various levels of enthusiasm, but she knows he’s there.

She doesn’t turn around.

Tonight is for dancing in a way that makes her think of long ago moments at the Bronze. Tonight is about having the sort of fun which belongs to the college parties she never went to. She’s here with a super hot guy who never needs a reservation and who does amazing things with his hands, and sure, she’s going to have to finally deal with him at the end of the night if not sooner, but for now she just gets to feel herself become long and loose and _fun_ , a Buffy she didn’t think was coming back, one she doesn’t know ever really got a chance to come into the world.

So she doesn’t turn and twirl, sweating, into Angel’s eyeline, doesn’t let his name come out of her mouth in that way it always does, like she meant to keep it inside, just for herself. She doesn’t do the small talk thing, or the big talk thing, doesn’t have to give a cookie dough status update. She doesn’t wind up talking circles around what she’s doing out with someone who actually hands out business cards with The Immortal printed on them, or talking squares around Spike and their...history.

She doesn’t end up smiling teasingly at his awkwardness at seeing her amid all the unfamiliarity of the club, the crowded sort of place where Angel has never managed to belong. They don’t find themselves agreeing to meet up for a coffee later after they’ve both finished “business” that they’re equally and purposefully vague about. She doesn’t get a chance to watch Angel beg a bored baristo in Italian for plain black coffee while she is already smugly sipping her caffè del nonno.

There’s no catching up over a table that’s too small for Angel’s frame, no debate over the deal with the devil/s that he’s apparently added to his resume or discussion about the “Slayer powers, activate!” of it all, no traded news about Will and Wes and Dawn and Giles. They don’t get the chance for him to see the way that her expression twists at the corners when she mentions Xander, for him to reach across the little table to press her arm and for her to know that he has also had to lead people he loves and who he hasn’t always been able to save; he understands.

The moment at the street corner doesn’t exist, where they slow-walk their way into parting, where she smiles more genuinely than she has in ages when he tells her how glad he is to see her doing well. They don’t have a careful hug which seems familiar and unfamiliar, not enough and more than anything, fitting for their always selves and something entirely new.

It could have happened. It almost did. But she doesn’t turn, because tonight is for her, this year is for her, to figure out who she is and all that’s happened to her and what she wants next. She and Angel find their way back to each other, they always do. Tonight is for her. She’ll keep dancing.

* * *

_+1 Listen, if we date you and I both know one thing's gonna lead to another._

**Angel, Reptile Boy**

“Oh, honey,” says Buffy, smiling gemlike over at him. “You always get me the nicest things.”

She plants her foot on the back of the last vamp, the one Angel has so helpfully kicked, already dazed, over to her. Her stake clattered somewhere into the gutter about five minutes back, but her bracelet is made of tough silver wire which she unravels just enough to wrap around the vamp’s neck; cutting through it takes only another few seconds, and then she is dusting herself off and leaning into the streetlight so she can twist her jewelry back into shape.

“Here,” says Angel, his big fingers easily managing to reform the metal. She presses up to kiss his cheek once he’s done, then searches for the wristlet she’d abandoned on the sidewalk at the beginning of the fight.

She pulls out her phone, waving it slightly at him. “See, I told you we’d make the 9:30 movie.”

“Well, considering that we had originally planned on the 8 o’clock showing, I’ll still call it a win.” He takes her hand and they start in the direction of the theater. “And I think if you’re not still on the phone with Dawn at a quarter to, next time we might make the 8:45.”

“She’s having big drama! It’s an official big sister duty to hear about big drama. And anyway, if we hadn’t started a little late, we’d have missed out on all this fun,” she reminds him, gesturing with her free hand toward the thankfully minimal wreckage left on the street from their fight. (One point for vampires: they clean up after themselves pretty well in the scheme of things.) “Don’t you know what they say about the couple that slays together?”

“They get arrested together when the neighbors call the police?” he asks mildly.

She ignores him, leaning easily into the soft rub of his sweater. “They get there for the previews, and there’s even enough time to make sure to put M&M’s in the popcorn.”

It is so strange but this all feels almost like déjà vu, inevitable, like she was always meant to end up in this moment, right beside him. After everything, all the pain and almosts and likely nevers, the sometimes shattering twists of her life, she ended up where she was supposed to be, out for date night, just the two of them.

He picks up their clasped hands and kisses the back of hers. “Oh good,” he says. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

**Author's Note:**

> I swear, I have _never_ struggled so much to find a title! Does that mean that this is a bit meandering and doesn't have a strong central theme? How dare I even suggest it...!


End file.
